Most of my burnt DVD backups from ~15 years ago no longer work. And those disks just sat in a case. Had loaded up a bunch to see if I still needed them.
Blu Ray Media Is Dead! Long Live...err, nothing?
- Thread starter Marzipan
- Start date
FreeKnight
Well-known member
Not surprising, the longevity of Optical formats seems to get exaggerated quite a bit and is really variable.
Brand (Verbatim or Taiyo yuden for highest quality) makes a huge difference, whether they're 'archival quality' or not, the dyes used, etc. Then you have to have specific storage conditions to get anywhere near the rated time period. I know for my 'ahem' backups of PS2/360 DVDs Verbatims and Taiyos were the only ones that were reliable when anywhere near capacity. Whether they were +/- mattered too (though I can't remember which was better)
BRs are supposed to be better than DVDs, but I suspect a lot of the same DVD issues will appear, cheap 'the source' house brand discs would likely be less reliable. Cheap discs fail more mid-burn or cheaper plastics degrade faster, etc.
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I don't recall the brand of the disks i'm sure they were just a stack of whatever CompuSmart, MemEx, B-Com or whoever else had on sale at the time.
There were so many retailers in Edmonton back then that you could buy computer parts. Now most seem to just use MemEx as a wholesaler. Supposedly it is one of the reasons why they have the limit 2/customer on a lot of deals because some of their wholesale customers used to come in and try to clear them out.
I have moved to using a 12 bay NAS with RAID10 and i'm trying to track down some more HDDs. I have a couple older 4 bays still laying around, I'll get rid of all but one and host it off-site and run a monthly sync or something to it. But to soak up the new NAS the drives need to be larger than what I have on hand.
There were so many retailers in Edmonton back then that you could buy computer parts. Now most seem to just use MemEx as a wholesaler. Supposedly it is one of the reasons why they have the limit 2/customer on a lot of deals because some of their wholesale customers used to come in and try to clear them out.
I have moved to using a 12 bay NAS with RAID10 and i'm trying to track down some more HDDs. I have a couple older 4 bays still laying around, I'll get rid of all but one and host it off-site and run a monthly sync or something to it. But to soak up the new NAS the drives need to be larger than what I have on hand.
Marzipan
Well-known member
I remember how excited everyone used to get when the cello wrapped 100 disc Taiyo Yuden value packs would be on an NCIX sale...and that was 20 years ago!!!
crazyea
Well-known member
Well we used to “backup”
our console and pc games.
CMetaphor
Quadfather
That actually makes me pretty worried about some older "disaster" backups I have in other places / safety deposit boxes. Might have to get them all out and re-burn them and/or put copies of the really important stuff on quality USB keys (I like the Corsair "Survivor" series - two layers of aluminum, air and water tight, etc) until a better option comes up...
Pretty sure the best I ever used was Verbatim DVD-Rs. But I assumed (possibly wrongly) that BD-Rs were just better in general, so wasn't as picky about the brand for those.
Yeah I went Raid 6 years back, hardware raid cards with BBUs, etc. I know it's not as stylish as modern things like UNRaid, but that BBU in particular I'm pretty sure has saved my data in the past. Even with a sine wave UPS protecting that file server, I fear what corruption may have occurred when the FS wants to shut down during a power failure to preserve UPS battery power, had I not had that BBU. It an extra layer of safety that I really appreciate.
I really need to find an off-site and reliable backup provider for my "collection", as I call it. My FS is filled with rips of ancient, weird and hard to finds shows I ripped myself, and since my flood Im not even sure where some of the original discs are, if they survived at all, so I've got no off-site disaster backup at all right now... scary position to be in. Ive got a couple of new externals to copy everything over to (long overdue, ugh) but they still wouldn't be off-site.
Can anyone recommend some off-site backup providers? Storage size, privacy and reliability are key factors. Speed not so much, I know it'll take days or longer to get everything uploaded the first time.
things like S3 Glacier Tier storage is really slow but relatively cheap, would have likely been the direction i took if I didn't have spare NAS's laying around.
Marzipan
Well-known member
when customers are going RAID 5, I recommend they include a hot spare and have two cold spares on hand and if RADI 6, two hot spares and four cold spares on hand. most usually decline the cold spares, but appreciate the logic of having the hot spares in place. that's not really feasible with NAS as they usually have big constraints on the storage bays available, but when its on the larger size, say 8+, that's when they listen.
